SIT DOWN, HAVE A DRINK, RELAX.

There is no plan B for the world

Many eminent scientists have said those words. One of the latest is Professor Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal. In an interview for This Cambridge Life in June this year he had this to say on the urgent need to address climate change –

Our planet is getting more crowded and our climate is warming. Climate change is not under-discussed but it’s dismayingly under-acted-upon. On the positive side, we have several politically realistic ways to mitigate the CO2 emissions warming the world by directing technology wisely.

The IPCC report was released today, it tells us it is crucially important, no matter where we might live on this planet, to ensure emissions are reduced, and to keep any increase in temperature below 1.5 C. Australia has many Pacific neighbours already being affected by climate change, but our government continues to deny them any help at all, let alone devise a way to reduce our increasing levels of emissions. It’s imperative our government stops adopting the ostrich posture, stops buck-passing by saying other nations need to do something before Australia acts and stops denying there is any such thing as climate change.

Our interim prime minister decided to rubbish the report even before it was released. He said the report was not about Australia and there was no need for this nation to do a thing about it. He was wrong, of course. Maybe he should have waited and read the report before he spoke, but that doesn’t seem to be his style. The report has the word “Australia” more than 30 times in the main body of text, and in addition there are the mentions of all the Australia scientists – more than a dozen – who contributed. Then Morrison went further. The Guardian reported his words.

Advice from the Energy Security Board has said that a business as usual scenario will mean the electricity sector will “fall short of the emissions reduction target of 26% below 2005 levels” by 2030.

Asked if Australia would be held to the target to reduce emissions by 26% to 28% from 2005 levels, Morrison said: “No, we won’t … we’re not held to any of them at all. Nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund. We’re not going to do that either. I’m not going to spend money on global climate conferences and all that nonsense.”

Australia has contributed $200m to the Green Climate Fund from 2015 to 2018, but the Coalition has come under pressure from One Nation to rule out making further contributions. The fund’s purpose is to help developing countries respond to climate change.

Morrison’s mendacity, ignorance and arrogance are breathtaking. Most Australians understand just how urgent it is to address climate change, to do all we can. Even the most conservative farmers are now, finally, beginning to understand climate change is real and is affecting the way they farm, yet Morrison keeps on pandering to the extreme right wingers in his government, all climate science deniers to their fingertips. He is really on the losing side of this debate, but he can’t seem to understand that. Why is he taking this stance? Why does he keep insisting our ageing and inefficient coal-fired, carbon-pumping power stations should have their lives extended, at huge cost, when renewables are cheaper and are what the power companies want to go with? Is he pandering to Trump, in the hope he will get an invitation to the White House? Is he after bigger donations to the Liberal Party from mining and gas companies? Is he just plain stupid? Or is there more to it? You can decide.

Meanwhile our only hope of reducing carbon emissions and starting to take action that might save what’s left of the Great Barrier Reef and our entire agricultural industry is to change the government. That cannot happen soon enough.

Some might believe that spin, I don’t. We know this RC was hastily announced to head off any criticism of the government after the first Four Corners program went to air. It was intended to make Scummo appear to be “doing something”.

The terms of reference are so broad that it’s going to take a lot longer than one lousy year to deal with this issue properly. I’d say this farce of a government has allocated only a year to the process in the hope most of the submissions will be skimmed over, and in the expectation revelations made in the earlier stages will give Scummo and Grunt some handy “we will improve these dreadful conditions” campaign material. That tactic may well backfire considering the cuts successive ATM government treasurers have made ti the aged care budget.

Thank goodness Scummo and his government will be long gone by the time the commissioners are ready to present their final report. I’m hoping an incoming Shorten government will substantially extend the timeframe .

And a cheerful article from Pepe Escobar re the Brazilian elections.
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Future of Western Democracy Being Played Out in Brazil

Stripped to its essence, the Brazilian presidential elections represent a direct clash between democracy and an early 21st Century neofascism, indeed between civilization and barbarism, writes Pepe Escobar.

…………………………………….Dystopia Central does not even begin to qualify it. Progressive Brazilians are terrified of facing a mutant “Brazil” (the movie) cum Mad Max wasteland ravaged by evangelical fanatics, rapacious neoliberal casino capitalists and a rabid military bent on recreating a Dictatorship 2.0.

………….Brazil has 42 million evangelicals – and over 200 representatives in both branches of Parliament. Don’t mess with their jihad. They know how to exercise massive appeal among the beggars at the neoliberal banquet. The Lula Left simply didn’t know how to seduce them.

This appeared last month, before the controversy over using the Opera House to advertise a horse race.

I hope Luke Foley has now changed his mind, but I don’t suppose he has. What is it with politicians and horse racing? Why are they all so keen to get involved?

LABOR PLAN WILL SEE THE EVEREST SCALE NEW HEIGHTS AND TURBOCHARGE NSW TOURISM
POSTED BY NSW LABOR ON SEPTEMBER 21, 2018

A Labor Government will:
Beam iconic Sydney images to the world by lighting up the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge at night with images of The Everest and conduct the barrier draw for The Everest on the Harbour or approaches to the Bridge;
Designate The Everest as a ‘major event’ putting it on the same footing as the NRL Grand Final; and
Work to install lights at Royal Randwick to grow the Spring Carnival and boost other races in the lead up to The Everest

The barrier draw for this year’s race was to be done at a big function at the Opera House, with the places shown on the sails while the guests partied in the forecourt. Due to the protests the organisers decided to hold the draw early in the day instead.

It’s not just NSW. Politicians are into this fixation with racing no matter what state they come from.

I loath racing. The whole thing is full of criminals, money launderers and drug pushers, the cruelty to the horses is appalling and the devastation gambling wreaks on families is a scandal, yet our politicians, no matter what side they are on, just love appearing at big carnivals, especially the Melbourne Cup. I don’t understand why politicians believe being seen at the races is a great idea.

I suppose we will soon be getting happy snaps of Scummo and his obedient little wife hanging out at the cup, or Derby Day, or both, accompanied by more media gushing.

The Ruddock report – just some stuff that sort of puts things in sequence.

The SMH editorial is right, the Wentworth by-election is the reason this report was being kept secret. Scummo and his henchgoons did not want it released until after 20 October. The government knew it would not be well received, especially not in that electorate.

Cabinet has had this report for months now, cabinet is said to have been debating it for months (more on that in a bit) and someone in the government certainly has considered it because it was leaked to Fairfax.

The report was kept secret in the lead-up to the Super Saturday by-elections in July,held back by a government terrified about the effect this report would have and desperate for a win.

Michelle Grattan (again) had this to say –

The government won’t be putting out the report before the July 28 byelections, and that tells us something. There are concerns about how this issue – the detailed carriage of which is with Attorney-General Christian Porter – will play in the public domain.

We don’t know what former Howard government minister Philip Ruddock and his panel have found – in particular what they’ve recommended about legislation to protect religious freedom.

But cabinet minister Dan Tehan has fired an early shot in the battle with his St Thomas More lecture, delivered in late June and run in The Australian last Saturday.

Tehan targeted two fronts: what he called “the creeping encroachment from the state on religious belief” and the “the use of political correctness to marginalise and silence the religious perspective”. A modern problem, he said, is “where religious freedom rubs against laws written to protect other rights”.

He’s concerned about what he sees as inadequacies in the present state and federal legal framework; he urges a Religious Discrimination Act to protect against discrimination on religious grounds and ensure other laws, such as state sex-discrimination acts, don’t restrict religious freedom more than is required

And now the whole thing has been leaked to Fairfax, just a week before parliament returns and two weeks before that by-election. The timing has been carefully chosen, calculated to cause maximum damage to the government ahead of a very tricky by-election. Now Labor and the cross-bench have time to consider their attack, and you can bet there will be some heated debate in both houses next week.

Hinch has made his plans –

I will move a notice of motion in the Senate Monday calling for any private school that discriminates against a teacher or student on sexuality grounds be stripped of all government funds and charity status.

And – for the conspiracy theorists –
It’s beginning to look like Turnbull planned all this well before he left the parliament. His decision to leave the parliament rather than face an election loss, the way he resigned, the deluge of leaks since he huffed off to New York, his tweets, his phone calls, and now, right at the worst possible time for the government, the leaking of the Religious Freedom Review, which you can bet Scummo would have tried to keep secret for as long as he possibly could. It is beginning to look like the work of a man who wanted to leave at a time of his choosing and wanted to destroy those who had ruined his time as prime minister.

In Melbourne the school you went to determined your employment outcomes as businesses would only hire the private protestant school alumni, the state public service was filled with catholic parochial schools etc etc

On this mornings radio it was pointed out that if you had a gay child, then would you remove all your children or just the gay one
Parents would avoid enrolling their kids in the school in case one turns out to be gay or to avoid the stigma of bigotry

Obviously she could not be allowed to stand: she’s not an old white male

Key points:

. Ms Quinn was preselected in June, with Deputy Premier John Barilaro saying he had a strong belief in her ability. She was criticised for a Facebook post showing her dressed as a pixie for a reading day
. The Nationals say they will look for a new candidate in the “near future”

Let’s face it: throwing kids out of school for being gay is disgusting. Not for a long, long time has such an idea been respectable in this country. But in 2018 Philip Ruddock’s religious freedom review has kept it on the table.

The ideal situation would be for the religious schools to be able to do what they like, but get no funding at all. The situation ought to be that the state says there is equality before the law for all LGBTIQ students, as for all citizens, and that any school that wishes to go against that dictum can expect nothing from the government. It preserves their ‘religious freedom’ while reminding them of their civic duties.

The current government sets appalling standards and projects appalling messages, and ought to be punished at the ballot box for it. Rabbiting on about the ‘religious freedoms’ of churches is neither their right nor their duty. Balancing the demands of the church against the standards of society is their duty, and in backing the church they’re abdicating that duty. That they can sit there and watch an overwhelming majority of this country vote for SSM – and even take credit for it as Turnbull tried to do – and then turn around and say “if these churches say gay children are monsters we’ll back them to the hilt’, is just unconscionable.

On a broader note: I saw one of Morrison’s video clips this morning (I have no idea how many of these he is producing), and searched for something resembling ‘information’ in it. To no avail. He made some claims about looking into aged care and reducing city congestion or something. But his main message is that none of these things can be done without money, and that’s why he’s helping small business by reducing taxes (?!) and broadening stuff they can claim for. It strikes me as odd that he’s planning on increasing revenue by reducing the sources of revenue, but that’s where populism leads you I suppose. Then he had a beer at a craft beer place on the Central Coast and claimed success.

The main thing I took out of it though is that it’s not really his fault. If we as a country are satisfied with having a bunch of egotistic middle-management types running the country (and let’s face it, that’s what the Liberal Party are), then it shouldn’t be any surprise to us that they behave like egotistic middle-management types. They don’t address climate change because they can’t see any short-term benefit from it. It’s not ideology or anything like that, it’s just myopia. They back the church in its mediaeval attitudes because they think it’s safer to stay on their good side. They trumpet small business tax cuts over proper economic stimulation because it’s an easier sell. And so on. It’s how they operate, and maybe it’s our fault (as a nation) for accepting it.

We often lambast political parties for lacking vision. But really, vision is too much of a stretch for them, and possibly not even what we need right now. At the moment we could just do with some rational, practical, consistent thinking – some suggestions regarding things that need to be done, and some notion of how those things can be sold to the public. I highly respect Daniel Andrews in that regard. He just went ahead and started replacing all the railway crossings, told us he was doing it and why, and didn’t bother entering into any debate about it. Who knows if it’s a vote winner? The fact was it was necessary. Matthew Guy is stuck whining about law and order, hoping to create a problem where none exists. It’s just an example, but it represents the kind of thinking this country needs.

Renewable energy ought to be a no-brainer. Out leaders need to just shut up and get on with it. Instead, we’re stuck with a government eternally looking for an ‘angle’, a ‘selling point’. That’s not what government should be about. They should be solving our problems for us, it’s what we pay them for.

Let’s not make the mistake of assuming all church schools discriminate against LGBTI students and assuming all state schools are models of tolerance. It doesn’t work that way.

I can only speak of my own experience, but I’ve been involved in schools as a teacher, a parent and now a grand-parent for longer than I care to think about.

My kids went through local Catholic schools. Some of the teachers at those schools were openly gay or lesbian, although none of them flaunted their sexuality. They just didn’t hide it. It was usual for these teachers to bring their partners to big school social events. No-one really cared. All my kids had classmates who were gay as well. Again, no-one really cared. These schools, and the Catholic schools in the wider area, where I taught for some years, have always had a non-discriminatory and compassionate approach. This also applied to staff going through family problems and divorce and to staff with mental illnesses like depression and nervous breakdowns.

Another local church school run by the biggest Pentecostal church here is entirely different.”Discrimination” should be part of that school’s name. I would not send a rabid dog to that school, let alone an impressionable child.

I’ve seen and heard some disgusting discrimination in NSW state schools, mostly against aboriginal kids. I’ve also seen discrimination in classrooms aimed at children from single parent homes and kids from public housing estates. I’ve heard some filthy remarks about people who happened to be not 100% heterosexual.

You can’t generalise by saying all church schools discriminate, or all state schools are more tolerant when it all depends on the culture of each individual school and on the way the principal runs a school. A good principal means a tolerant and fair school environment, a weak or bigoted principal means the school will reflect that.

While I’d like to agree that schools that refuse to accept LGBTQI students or staff should lose all government funding I can’t, because it’s just too difficult to do, in practice. If this is to be allowed on the grounds freedom of religion means a school can discriminate against LGBTQI students and staff then where does that discrimination stop? Do we allow schools to refuse to employ or to sack staff who are living with a partner without being married? What about divorced staff? What about staff who are adulterers? Can these discriminatory schools also refuse to take students from homes where parents are divorced, or “living in sin” or adulterers? All these things can be seen as grounds for refusing to take students or staff on the grounds of religious freedom to discriminate, and I’m not talking about just Christian beliefs here.

Where does the line get drawn? Exactly which schools would lose funding?

Let’s face it. All Australian kids deserve the best education we as taxpayers can give them. They all deserve equal opportunities. If we start making laws about which kids can be turned away and which schools won’t get funding then we are heading in the same direction as those who want to see all government funding, state and federal, taken from all private schools and we are also heading towards a very discriminatory and biased view of education in this country.

This is a wealthy country. We can afford to give our kids the best possible education and parents should have the right to choose whatever school they like. The best way to show disapproval of any one school’s policies on admission, staffing or anything else is to go somewhere else. We have had that right for a very long time. We don’t need it enforced by nasty laws foisted on us by a religious nutjob of a prime minister.

A man has been caught drug driving in the Adelaide Hills with a child sitting in his lap, and in a bid to escape further punishment, has allegedly claimed the child was the one driving.https://t.co/jGgYfwg8IJ

We are fvcked. I can only hope my descendants are amongst the survivors and contribute to the action to mitigate AGW and rebuild a better world. They can start by damning the narcissists and the selfish.

Someone should have asked him one simple question – if the “existing law” allows schools to discriminate against students and staff on the basis of their sexuality, then why does he insist we need new legislation?

Scott Morrison refused to answer questions over whether he thought it was fair a child be rejected from a school because of their sexual orientation, instead stayed on message that it’s ‘existing law’. pic.twitter.com/4WRhSYwmDo

The “existing law” (which I bet Scummo would not have been able to identify) is Section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984.

Educational institutions established for religious purposes
(1) Nothing in paragraph 14(1)(a) or (b) or 14(2)(c) renders it unlawful for a person to discriminate against another person on the ground of the other person’s sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status or pregnancy in connection with employment as a member of the staff of an educational institution that is conducted in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a particular religion or creed, if the first-mentioned person so discriminates in good faith in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents of that religion or creed.

(2) Nothing in paragraph 16(b) renders it unlawful for a person to discriminate against another person on the ground of the other person’s sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status or pregnancy in connection with a position as a contract worker that involves the doing of work in an educational institution that is conducted in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a particular religion or creed, if the first-mentioned person so discriminates in good faith in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents of that religion or creed.

(3) Nothing in section 21 renders it unlawful for a person to discriminate against another person on the ground of the other person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status or pregnancy in connection with the provision of education or training by an educational institution that is conducted in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a particular religion or creed, if the first-mentioned person so discriminates in good faith in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents of that religion or creed

Scummo can’t have this both ways. He can’t claim there is an existing law that allows schools to discriminate for religious reasons while also claiming we absolutely must have a new law to allow that same form of discrimination. The only reason for new legislation would be if the Religious Freedom Review goes much further than we have been told so far. That is a chilling thought.

SWEIDA: A Bloody Massacre Barely Registered by Western Media as ISIS Slaughter Innocent Civilians in their Sleep

At the entrance to Shrehi, one of the villages attacked by ISIS in July, we stopped the car to visit the poster that had been erected with the names of the martyrs killed during the attack. Young men, women, children, murdered by a terrorist group with a history of collusion with the US Coalition against Syria and the Syrian Arab Army. Acclaimed journalist, Elijah J. Magnier wrote at the time:

“ISIS knew it was possible for its convoy to drive under the eyes of a superpower state (the US) without being disturbed.”

Very strange… Iran fired missiles at ISIS in Syria. Killed several ISIS leaders – almost killed Al-Baghdadi. US complained (!!) saying Iran was reckless, cuz the strike was within 3 miles of US troops.

But why was ISIS leader Baghdadi feeling so safe so close to US troops????

A wide-ranging report into the relationship between President Donald Trump and Sheldon Adelson says that Trump intervened on the GOP mega-donor’s behalf in the Jewish billionaire’s quest to open a casino in Japan.

The report published Wednesday by news site ProPublica and public radio station WNYC said that Trump told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe he should strongly consider allowing Adelson to open a casino in the country.

“It was totally brought up out of the blue,” one person briefed on the exchange told ProPublica/WNYC. “They were a little incredulous that he would be so brazen.” After the exchange in which Trump said he should consider Las Vegas Sands for a license, “Abe didn’t really respond, and said thank you for the information,” the person said.

Interesting that it seems only the Labor MPs on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics are asking the hard questions. Matt Thistlethwaite and Claire O’Neill are really doing all the work, it seems.

Boggle boggle !I just read an article about the race to build an Exaflop computer in the next couple of years. Some may remember the first ‘celebrity’ super computer the Cray 1. The exaflop babies will do in 1 second what the Cray would take 205 years to do !!